Prior to joining Calico, Amoolya was Vice President of Research and Development at Amyris, where she led a 30-person bioinformatics and software engineering group whose work included innovations in genotype representation and data visualization, building mathematical and statistical models to analyze high-throughput, multivariate genotype and phenotype data; metabolic modeling and design-of-experiments to perturb microbial biochemical pathways and to identify bottlenecks therein; and statistical process control to accelerate the R&D pipeline.

She earned a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and a Master of Science in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. Amoolya completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg, Germany and a Computational and Life Sciences fellowship at Emory University in the fields of comparative genomics and metagenomics, population genetics and experimental evolution. Between degrees, Amoolya worked as a software engineer at an internet startup, a multinational wireless telecommunications firm and a Wall Street investment bank.